Plan ahead; get your boxes shipped on time

News-Times, The (Danbury, CT), Deirdre O'Shea COPLEY NEWS SERVICE

Published 1:00 am, Thursday, December 9, 2004

Exchanging holiday gifts is a way of celebrating friendships and family bonds, especially when the ones we love are far away. To avoid stress during the season of giving, shop early and don't put off shipping your presents.

To make sure that gifts arrive in time for Christmas, set a firm deadline for wrapping and shipping. Remember, the earlier you ship, the cheaper its going to be.

"If you put off mailing, you end up having to purchase a more expensive service to meet your needs," says
Wendy Huff
, an East Coast-area operations manager for the
UPS Store
franchises. "If something must go coast to coast in three days, it has to go by air - and you'll pay a premium."

At the Web site
www.iship.com
, a subsidiary of United Parcel Service (UPS), individuals can compare rates of UPS, the U.S.
Postal Service
and DHL/
Airborne Express
by plugging in the size, weight and destination of a package. Each of these shippers (and FedEx) also has a Web site describing its services with a cost-calculation feature. Insurance, if desired, is an additional cost to consider.

As a rule of thumb, small packages can be mailed inexpensively using Parcel Post or Priority Mail at the post office. However, Priority Mail does not guarantee delivery times. The average delivery time is two to three days, but for longer distances this can easily become five to six days. And the Postal Service does not have an instant tracking system. For heavy packages, the cheaper option will be UPS Ground or FedEx Ground (the home-delivery division is known as FedEx Home Delivery).

To avoid long lines (the peak shipping day usually falls about two weeks before Christmas), UPS and FedEx offer online shipping labels that can be printed out. Packages can then be dropped in a pickup box. And with the recent acquisition of a franchise network of shipping stores (UPS acquired
Mail Boxes Etc
. - most of which have rebranded as the UPS Store - and FedEx has teamed up with Kinko's) UPS and FedEx have more locations than ever.

"FedEx Kinko's is another alternative to a person going to a
FedEx World Service Center
," says
Jim McCluskey
, a company spokesman. "Our goal is to make ourselves easily accessible and make the process simple, to better serve our customers."

The best time to ship your gifts, says Huff, is the week or two after Thanksgiving. The stores aren't busy yet and personnel will be able to give you almost individual attention. And this is early enough to accommodate weather delays.

"There's always strange stuff happening in December," Huff says. "There's fog in the South, snowstorm in the North and ice in the mid-Atlantic states."

When it comes to packing gifts, Huff suggests using a sturdy box, preferably new, with no holes or old labels. The only acceptable tape to use is sturdy brown or clear packing tape.

Before a gift is wrapped, it must be properly packed to avoid breakage. Huff has often seen beautifully wrapped gifts that had to be undone for repacking. She suggests taking fragile items to a shipper for packing, then wrapping them. After, they can be boxed and shipped.

If you're boxing a gift yourself, use a box big enough for layers of bubble wrap or other packing material. If the gift is fragile and hollow, the inside should be stuffed with paper. Be sure to include the full address and your return address, written very clearly.

And don't hesitate to call the recipient to tell them something is on the way. There's no point in trying to surprise someone only to find out weeks later they never received the gift. Tracking it down then will be that much harder.

If a self-imposed shipping deadline arrives, and the boxing and wrapping aren't done, admit defeat. Gather presents and addresses, and give the task to a charity that's raising money by wrapping. Next stop is a full-service shipping site. Then you'll be free to go enjoy an eggnog latte or begin baking Christmas cookies.